Bread and Roses
by sakurasencha
Summary: Finnick/Annie ficlets and drabbles. Chapter 4: Lullaby: Finnick sings to Annie's tummy.
1. Paper Chains

_First THG fic. I wanted to do something to get my feet wet with Finnick/Annie, so here's a little ficlet to start the ball rolling._

* * *

**Paper Chains**

They broke down the door to her cell. "Annie Cresta? My name is Gale Hawthorne." Told her she was free. "We're taking you to District 13." Her wrists bore thin, deep ligature marks and a metallic feel, but she buried her face in Finnick's chest and felt like she'd been Remade.

The old wounds healed. Every scar scrubbed clean. And his skin next to hers was soft and soothing, a poultice for her heart as they lay side by side.

Yet over time Annie discovered there was a strangeness to her newfound freedom. And the strangeness, she decided, must come from the sameness. Everything changed while everything didn't in the confines of District 13. She could walk where she pleased, except when she couldn't, could do whatever she wished as long as her wishes were approved and notarized by an authority not her own.

It took two days for Coin to mull over their request, approach them to declare that a wedding was, "probably a very good idea – would make a perfect propo, actually," and that _she would allow it_.

"When do you think we'll be able to stop asking permission to live our lives?" she wondered aloud one evening.

Finnick sat trimming his hair by the mirror. From the bed she watched his hand slowly descend as he set his scissors down on the table. "I know this place can be a little…stifling."

"It's not the place. It's not the walls or the ceiling or the air…" Her gaze lapsed. She stared and stared at a locus known only to her, on the blank wall opposite seeing nothing much at all, or perhaps far too much to bear.

"Annie? Annie?" When she snapped back she saw Finnick laying by her on the bed, felt him shaking her arm. He picked up the pieces of her thoughts and handed them back to her. "What were you saying? About District 13?"

She shook out the cobwebs, rested her head on his chest and closed her eyes. "Some of the people here scare me. They remind me of the Capitol. Not the lights and glitter and all that, but what's underneath. Take off the makeup and wigs and they look the same as the Captiol, and that scares me." Her head rose and fell with Finnick's chest. She envisioned ebbing tides, a boy with barley colored hair swimming out to sea, spearing fish, spearing flesh. Red seeping into blue waters, and Coin laughing over a pile of glamorous bodies. "What do you think, Finnick?" she whispered. "What kind of nation would they make out of Panem?"

"I don't know." He paused. "I'm not always sure I want to find out. But, Annie… it has to be better than what Panem is now." He sighed. "Just wait, Annie. When everything's over we'll take out our boat and never come back, find a nice little island and set up our own damn country."

Annie laughed. "President Finnick?"

"President Annie." He spooled a bit of her fanning hair over his finger. "You'd be a much more benevolent leader."

"I don't know." She drew up so she could see his face, kiss his lips. "I might be too nice. I might let you get away with anything."

They kissed. And despite the subtle underbelly they were happy. Deliriously so. But then that had always been the case as long as they were together, even back in Four where they had the sun and the beach and could watch the gulls circling unchained above and think – _one day_.

Here they lived in a stone mine under artificial lights, and a future like jelly. They never spoke of it directly, but as time skipped by Finnick began to spend more time with the others. He ran laps and sparred, spent more and more hours on the range, wielding weapons designed solely for him. Oh no, his actions screamed, they were not out of the fire yet; perhaps they hadn't even left the pan.

And the unspoken question that carved a small sliver of doubt between them: "What comes next?"

"The invasion of the Capitol," Finnick finally told her after a meeting with those Important People Annie couldn't name and never really wanted to learn. The ones with hunger in their eyes. The ones who scared her. He pulled her close and whispered into her hair. "They're drawing up the final attack plans now."

"An invasion…" The dramatic conclusion to this tale. She could see it written as clear as the stars on a calm night. It had all come down to this; there could be no other ending. There was no other choice.

"It'll be a little while yet, but…. it's what everyone's been training for."

"What _you've _been training for." She fixed her eyes to his.

He looked away. "Annie." He opened and closed his mouth several times, gathering each word one by one. "It's not as if I'll be a foot soldier. I won't even be involved in the actual invasion. Squad 451…. we're the face of the rebellion, the morale. They want us out there, but not in danger, just a steady force offering support, keeping the spirits alive. So there's the Mockingjay, of course, a few of the regulars from District 13. And me." He flashed one of his wide, expensive smiles. "They want to keep my face on the cameras. I can't say I blame them."

She sniffed and wiped her eyes. "No jokes, please. Not now."

"Annie…."He put her arms around her and pulled her close. "You don't want me to go."

"I never want you to go. But I would never ask you to stay."

"No. You never do." Because he had to go, he had to go, and it was hard enough to do what he had to do without her _pleading_.

"If you had a choice…"

"But I don't. Someone has to go."

He had invoked the impassable. "Yes." The District 4 motto. _Someone has to go_, and fight, and die. And if it must be someone, let it be someone with a fighting chance. _I volunteer_. And what better fighter than Finnick Odair, born and bred for killing? He was strong and smart and cunning, and the odds were always in his favor.

"You'll go," she told him. "You'll go."

The countdown started that day. But they never talked about dwindling time or what lay beyond the farewell. They were accustomed to basking in the happier things and ignoring the prods of the future.

When the sun rose on the morning of the squad's departure Finnick hung back in their room till the last possible second.

She watched him pace and fidget. "I thought Coin doesn't like tardiness."

"Coin doesn't like me."

She doesn't seem to mind using you, Annie thought, but didn't say, because she saw the fear creeping on his face and one day they would have their own island. "Come sit here," she told him. He obeyed. "Look what I've made for you." A paper shell lay in her palm, threaded with a cord made from her hair. "You'll wear it against your heart. Just make sure it keeps beating."

He looked up at the ceiling, tried to balance the swaying waters. "I don't have anything for you, Annie." She laughed. He never did. Finnick was at a loss when it came to mementos.

"What about a message?" She smiled. "One meant only for me?"

"They're only ever meant for you." But he agreed to the exchange. He never had a shortage of things to say. "What should it be? Another poem?"

"No. I think you'll be too busy for long verses. Just wink at the camera, and I'll know you love me." They snatched their last, heated kisses until someone called for him from the corridor. "Finnick," she said.

"Yeah?"

"They're calling for you."

He nodded, kissed her once more, and turned to leave.

"Finnick?" She gripped his arm. Finnick looked at her, waiting, wondering what her final words to him would be. Annie wondered as well. She never kept secrets from Finnick, but she carried a secret now, inside of her she carried a secret that might make him stay. Would she choose to tell him? Seconds passed and then minutes. She contemplated wringing her words into the right pitch, the right shape, into the truth that he did not know which might make him stay.

"Just come home, Finnick," she said. "Just come home," she repeated, and repeated.

"I will. I will." He smiled and brushed both of their eyes. "I always do." He winked once, and then he was gone.

* * *

And then he was gone.

* * *

The sun rises over waves that remind her of his eyes, so she moves to a place without water.

"Let me tell you a story," she begins one day. "A story of a revolution."

_How does it end?_

"With heartbreak." But something else, too, and she will get to that part later. Right now she simply rocks him in her arms, bathes him with love and a shower of tears.

* * *

The wells haven't dried but they sink deeper, draw up less and less with each passing year.

Curls of barley colored hair call out to her, splash at the shore, kick up sand and spray and laughter. He has no darkness in his eyes or wariness in his dreams. And Annie thinks, this, _this_, is how it ended. And she consoles herself that there was no other way.

_Was there?_ What would have changed if Finnick had stayed? If she had told him her tethering news and he had stayed? Perhaps he would have lived. Perhaps he would have died. Perhaps they would have all died, he and she and everyone else, the Capitol still in power and the seventy-sixth hunger games broadcast round the world.

"How did it end?" Green eyes stare up at her.

"I'll get to that part later. First I need to tell you how it started." With a boy and a girl and a country on fire. With Finnick – her Finnick – her sad, broken boy from District 4 who always put the greater good above his own. Who died the way he had lived.

She felt free.


	2. of things to come

**of things to come**

"Finnick? Finnick, are you all right?"

_Pull it together, get your smile on straight. The arena has eyes and ears, and a perfect memory. He's watched you stumble; don't give him the satisfaction of watching you fall. _

"Yeah. I'm alright. I'm alright."

_Wave off her hovering, you need your space. Pull it together, because it was all an illusion, a twisted trick of the mind. Mind games. Hunger games. We're all just children playing a game, and you and you and you, you are one of the most expendable pieces. _

_So sit up and stand up and get her sobbing face out of your brain, because you'll likely never see it again, and it was just a jabbering jabberjay, her voice crippled with pain wasn't real and no one's screaming in a warehouse of torture. _

At least not yet.

"_Finnick!"_

He is not all right.

...

Dusk is heavy in the sky when he heads towards the waters. Not for the first time, Finnick considers himself lucky to have a trace of home inscribed into the arena.

He wades in. The salted water takes to his pores like an old friend as he hunkers down, soaks up the cool of the evening that will not allay the burning in his ears.

"_Finnick!"_

The view is just gorgeous.

So beautiful, in fact, that Finnick nearly relinquishes his hands from the safety of the waves to reach out to the mesmerizing hues – now nothing but a thin, glowing line on the horizon. Were that he could touch it, that such goodness could be so easily grasped, held, kissed till she falls asleep under a blanket of dark hair, a murmured name on her lips.

"_Finnick!"_

Nothing but pleasure for his eyes on a dreamy night like this. And if and when the ugliness begins to encroach – a little dimming of the lights, a simple drop of his lids like a curtain before the finale, and all the troubling sights disappear in a snap, never have the chance to make a home in his memory. No nameless buyer with orange peel hair and matching lips stretching across face. No dollops of blood trailing off his trident after his freshest kill.

His eyes have always had it easy.

"_Finnick!"_

But there's nothing like lids for his ears, oh no, and the sounds – the _sounds_ – they never leave him. Before the imprint of Annie into his life they were possibly the one constant in the whirlwind, cannons booming like a band on parade, the crooning songs of his lovers, a crescendo of Capitolite disharmony and all the other things he will never unhear.

A beloved voice bent like shrapnel, a perfect rendition of agony if her ever heard one.

"_Finnick!"_

Annie, Annie – he can't quite remember the timbre of her voice unladen with terror. And her face undistorted with pain is becoming a distant memory. But he tries to latch on to a what he can – she likes to cover her ears, doesn't she? Finnick thinks he could slice his ears clean off and still hear the pitch perfect echo of her torment.

He throws back his head with a random laugh at the moon, and thinks he understands her now more than ever.

…

"The sounds weren't real, you know." Bless Johanna. She's a good friend, but should know better than to lather him with pity.

So he curses her instead. "Thanks. I didn't understand that the third time Beetee explained it to me." He senses her winding up for a spar, and disarms her with a glittering smile. "Fourth times the charm?"

"Sorry for getting off my ass enough to care." Johanna picks up her axe with a wicked frown. "You know what – just forget it." She kicks sand into his lap as she trots away.

Finnick resumes his task. _Over, under, and through. _His hands work to a steady tempo. Weaving, tying, a net fashions to life in his hands. It's important to have a focus, Mags would constantly tell him. When your grip starts to loosen, find something else to hold onto. Keep your hands occupied and hope your mind follows suit.

_Over, under, and through._

But it's not a fruitless exercise, either, and the purpose drives him further. They need the food, so they need the fish, so they need the net. So he keeps knotting, knotting, regrouping the fragments of himself that are still drifting in the water. Reminding himself that Johanna is right, the sounds weren't real. Manufactured somewhere in an underground laboratory. Fabricated, precisely manipulated to unhinge him, and so easy an undertaking even a child from District Three could do it – probably did do it, knowing the Captiol's outsourcing tendencies.

_Over, under, through. _A final tug, and Finnick carries his net to the water.

...

So breathe, Finnick. Undoubtedly she is safe and cozy in your home, probably glued to the television, curled up on the couch like she was on that final night as you paced mazes all over the floor.

_The risks, the risks_. You tried, God help you, you _tried_ enumerating them to her that night before you left for the Quarter Quell.

"They'll take it out on you, if anything goes…wrong." _If anything_. As if there weren't only one thing that could ever go wrong, and it smelled a lot like sabotage, looked even more like rebellion.

Not that Annie would know anything. Nope. Nothing to see, nothing to hear. Your involvement in possible insurgency was probably the worst kept secret in your relationship.

Not that she knew specifics. She was always adamant about not knowing specifics. "I can't give anything away. I can't…I don't always know what I'm saying. I wouldn't want to do anything that could compromise…." She'd have to trail off to silence at that point, and place a finger over your protesting lips. Tell you, "So keep quiet," in a determined hush.

A hard order to swallow, when everything she said presumed her own capture. "I won't live with myself if anything happens to you." You worried your lip, worried your hands.

But you couldn't worry her. "I would die if it meant defeating the Capitol." She is the only one you know who can smile while speaking about their own death. "You know I would."

The sounds weren't real. So why do your hands shake in tandem with the currents as you bury them in the water? Didn't you prepare? Didn't you carefully burn away all the edges of your fraying excuse for a mind? Compartmentalizing, some bespectacled man had once told you, and your damn good at it. So pull it together, rope Annie back off into the compartment where she belongs, because the sounds weren't real.

_At least not _–

…

After half an hour he catches at least a dozen white fish. The others have already started a fire. Smoke drifts up to a flawless blue sky as Annie fades. District four fades. His whole life fades to nothing but this very moment, the dragon mouth they call an arena, and keeping Katniss alive.

But he still can't rid himself of the sounds. And he can hear _everything_ – everything but the chatter of his allies, the latent bursts of breeze that rip through the swaying canopies, the quiet _lap lap lap_ against his legs.

He hears nothing at all, and everything all at once, an onslaught of inevitability rushing into his ears.

"_Finnick! Help me!"_

And so so so very hideously real, because Finnick knows he's hearing the sounds of his future.


	3. Exhale

_Written for the Caesar's Palace monthly one shot challenge for May, for the prompt, "But you can't breathe in if you don't breathe out." I wasn't intending on writing anything but inspiration struck at the final hour _(and literally written in an hour, ha!)_, so here you go! _

* * *

_But you can't breathe in if you don't breathe out._

* * *

**Exhale**

"What's it like?"

"What?"

"You know…." Sylvia Cresta made vague, meaningless gestures with her hands, mouthed _the arena_ slowly and methodically, like a child just learning how to read.

Annie hugged her knees tighter. "Oh." She bent her head down and trembled from head to toe.

"Mom! It's happening again!" Their mother shouted her way up the stairs, scolded young Sylvia back down them. When mother was alone with her fractured eldest and everything was sorrow and silence, she draped one arm over her daughter's shoulders and stayed that way till the shaking calmed, the breathing slowed, and the sun was long sunk beneath the blue-black waters that shifted from beyond the open window.

She laid Annie's head down upon a cool pillow and covered the rest of her with a sheet.

For hours Annie stared blankly up. No light seeped into her remote little corner to guide her, and she whispered into the night, the sea of darkness that threatened to engulf her:

"Like holding your breath."

* * *

The irony of Annie's win was not lost on the population of Panem. Originally, she'd been slated among the top five contenders with her fay personality and sleek ability to handle a blade. But her position nose-dived to last place after a well-placed slice by a scimitar, the soundless scream of her district partner as he stared up at her from vacant eyes no longer attached to a body.

She screamed. She ran.

She never stopped running.

She was mad, they said. And easy pickings. Everyone knew it and adjusted accordingly.

Later, Annie would wish that she had been in her right mind so she could have laughed in all their faces when every bet was upset. _How could this happen? _Game analysts were having a field day. Conjectures were tossed to and fro like skiffs in a storm. Was it an accident, intentional? The Districts didn't know, the Capitolites didn't know.

Annie knew. Not _how_, but she knew why. Acceding waters were sent to ensnare each and every one of them, to level the playing field and remind them that they were _all_ at the mercy of the Capitol, that they were nothing, had nothing, owned nothing – not intelligence or survival skills or a deathly way with a sword – not even the very air in their lungs.

Two days after the arena flooded, a booming voice declared Annie Cresta had won the seventieth hunger games.

They say it was because she was the best swimmer.

Annie knew it was because she was the best at holding her breath.

* * *

The early months were just shy of unbearable. Her mother's voice crackled on the line. "She's not getting any better." She cried most nights into the receiver, seeking the only recourse she could.

Finnick Odair lived two doors down, a phone call away, and more recently on the couch in the Crestas' living room.

The mornings were hardest, whether or not she had slept. The night and its terrors seemed to infuse into her, and it took hours of sitting at the beach under raw sunlight before she would say a word.

"Did you tie your knots today, Annie?"

Maybe it was because he was one of the last voices she heard before the arena claimed her, but when he spoke to her the beacons lit and eventually, often very slowly, she found her way home.

"Every last one." She reached into her bag and raised a passable slipknot she had tied two days ago as evidence. "See?"

Finnick laughed. Annie didn't keep it a secret that she hated tying knots. _To each her own_. "Annie Cresta tied that knot today," he said. "Real or not real?"

She shot him a look. "Are you being funny or is that a part of the therapy?"

"I'm not your _therapist_!"

She laughed. "Well then what are you?"

He examined her while he thought this over. "A friend."

Annie smiled. She nodded. "Real."

* * *

On her worst days, she would sit from dawn till dusk as if catatonic, no word or look or plea that could broach the insurmountable walls her mind had built to protect her from horror, but also stranded her from the ones who might save her.

When asked later, she would try to explain those moments. "If I open my mouth…." If she opened her lungs, in rushed the water to devour her, weigh her down, and she would sink to the black, endless bottom like the rocks and the children whose heads bobbed below and never resurfaced. "If I open my mouth I drown. I die." It was just that simple.

Finnick took her hand. "You're not in the water, Annie."

"I'm always in the water." Even now she could feel the icy fingers lacing around her neck. "I can never leave them." She turned to him, said accusingly, "You told me if I won it would all be over. You said I could leave and never go back."

"Annie, you're not in the Capitol and you're never going back."

"But it came back with me," she whispered. "I took a part of it with me."

"We all do. But the question is, are you going to hold onto it forever?"

Annie cocked her head and narrowed her eyes, studying him. Up close, she always thought he resembled a well-loved toy, constantly fixed and re-stitched, yet still looking slightly broken. _Like attracts like_, so she's been told. Is that why Finnick was always found near her? "Are you?" she finally asked.

He shook his head and smiled. She thought he might laugh, perhaps cry. "Yes. Maybe." He ran a hand through his hair. "They drag me back and won't let me go. I'm a lost cause. But you?" He poked a finger into her arm. "You'll stay in Four, no question. You can let it all go, try to forget, to heal."

She swallowed. "To leave you behind?"

"If that's what it takes." He looked towards the ocean. Sailboats dotted the horizon, drifted with the wind and current. But he would always be on a leash, connected to the Capitol by speed dial and an armada of lightning fast trains. "I'm half Capitol, I know. If you want to outgrow them, you'll have to outgrow me."

"So you think you're past saving."

"I think there's not anything worth to save."

His bluntness struck Annie; she felt nearly blinded by the potency of his words until they sunk in, became mixed and diluted with other thoughts and finally resolved into a picture as clear as day: the two of them struggling in the same lifeboat.

Annie began to laugh. "Was that funny?" he asked, slightly on edge.

"No. No. But I just realized I spend all my time fighting for breath, while you're busy trying to drown yourself."

For a minute he sat in shocked silence. Then he started laughing. "Yeah. I guess we are a pair." He wiped his eyes.

Her eyes blurred and she wiped them as well. "Quite a pair." Her life was a constant battle to keep her head above water, keep the air in her lungs – air, the sustenance of life. But then and there Annie realized to truly live she must let it go. Let it go so she can take more in. Let it go so she can give it to another. "Such a pair that maybe we could help each other out?"

"You mean help each other breathe?"

She laughed. "Let's not rush things. Help each other _learn_ to breathe, I think." Of course she'd never leave him behind, _outgrow_ him. Because he needed her to fight for him, fight for every ounce of air. And because without him, she'd never stop holding her breath.

_Let it go._

He was her exhale.

* * *

_Thanks for reading! Too late to do a lot of editing so feel free to point out grammatical issues._


	4. Lullaby

Based off a tumblr prompt:

_Finnick singing lullabies to Annie's pregnant tummy because the baby is squirming around and keeping Annie awake._

* * *

The baby danced in the predawn darkness. Annie would have called it beautiful, if he wasn't still in utero.

"Oww…"

Finnick stirred beside her. "Annie?" After two Hunger Games the smallest disturbance would rouse him - a faint whisper, a creak behind the door. Mechanical clocks were banned outright. "Annie, what's wrong?"

"Nothing, just…" Her tummy tensed at a vicious kick. "Just, baby's conducting a concerto in there. With his whole body."

Finnick sat up. "Can I help?" He was far too perky for two in the morning. Ever since Annie had announced the imminent arrival of their plus one Finnick had been falling over himself to be of use. "Maybe a little song would help relax him."

"Maybe." Annie pushed an unwilling smile onto her face. In all their years she never had the heart to tell him that of his many talents, singing was most definitely, without a doubt, positively not among them. "Sure, why not give it a shot?" she said through clenched teeth.

Finnick leaned over her protruding belly, and softly began:

"_Blow the wind Southerly, Southerly, Southerly,  
Blow the wind South o'er the bonnie blue sea.  
Blow the wind Southerly, Southerly, Southerly  
Blow bonnie breeze, my true lover to me."_

A old District Four shanty. Every mother sang it to their children, every child to their friends on the play yard. The kind of song stitched to the hearts of everyone in the District, connecting them, binding them to the same fabric of community.

"_They told me last night there were ships in the offing…."_

And he butchered it.

"_And I hurried down to the deep rolling seeeea!"_

The atonal, off key crooning sent the baby into apoplexy. Annie closed her eyes, a thin smile forming. After all, it was still Finnick's voice and she couldn't stop herself from enjoying it at least marginally.

"_But my eye could not see it wherever might be it,  
The bark that is bearing My lover to meeeeeee_."

Finnick wore his triumphant smile. "There. Baby all better?"

Annie couldn't resist a grin. A song of the past, a song to carry like a torch into their future. A song to remind them that even in this new world being reshaped with fire they owned a history and culture, no matter how phenomenally bad the singing.

"Not quite," she said. "Why don't you sing it again?"


End file.
